![]() ![]() “A lot of those technologies are what is enabling the building of a lot of these fancy, expensive, new large, ground-based and space-based telescopes today,” he said. He worked with technologies related to telescopes and telescope building - for example, figuring out the precise shape of optical mirrors that needed to be used. Proteep went on to study physics and specialised in optics. Moreover, he began accompanying his mother to the 1‑metre telescope at the Vainu Bappu Observatory in Kavalur, Tamil Nadu. Both his parents were astronomers, and so dinner table conversations tended to revolve around scientific discoveries, newly published papers, the latest images from the Hubble Space Telescope, etc. “We also designed an astronomy elective course, and that’s how over the last 6 – 7 years, we’ve built up a culture of astronomy here,” said Proteep, who himself had benefited profoundly from such a culture. Ever since, the astronomy enthusiasts on campus have gotten together for periodic stargazing nights. It was a matter of great joy for Proteep and his students when the University agreed to fund the purchase of an 8‑inch telescope. Despite being terribly unwieldy, it is said to have been used to discover Enceladus and Mimas, the 6 th and 7 th moons of Saturn.īuilding a culture of astronomy using a telescope ![]() 2‑metre telescope that would remain the largest telescope in the world for 50 years. By 1781, William Herschel had built a 6‑inch telescope which he used to discover Uranus, the first planet to be discovered by a telescope. Newton is credited with the breakthrough of using mirrors instead of lenses, and this allowed telescopes to see better whilst staying relatively compact. The trouble was, lenses get really thick as they expand in diameter, so telescopes with large lenses were too heavy to maneuver. Over the next few decades, the lens inside telescopes got bigger, and we could see more and more of the solar system. “That was really revolutionary for the time,” pointed out Proteep Mallik, who teaches physics at Azim Premji University and specialises in telescope optics. Even with such a small lens size, Galileo was able to see the four largest moons of Jupiter. Galileo, considered to be the first to point a telescope towards the sky, used a lens that was just a few centimetres in size. And humans have come a long way in our engineering of telescopes. The bigger this number, the more light the telescope can collect and the further out in space we can see. The ‘Thirty’ in TMT refers to the diameter of the primary lens or mirror inside a telescope. Along the way, the TMT project has unwittingly revived the age-old conflict of ‘whose science is this anyway?’ The earliest telescopes The Thirty Metre Telescope ( TMT) is an international mega project that, once completed, could tell us about supermassive black holes, the early universe, planets outside our solar system and the possibility of life in them. The typical modern office building façade hides the fact that inside, cutting-edge machines are precisely polishing and preparing about 84 mirror segments to be shipped to Hawaii, where they will be assembled into one of the world’s largest telescopes. Just about 30 kilometres from the University campus, in Hoskote taluk in Karnataka, lies the India-TMT Optics Fabrication Facility ( ITOFF).
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